


a portrait

by dlm



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M, i guess, kek, with sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 10:37:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9319931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dlm/pseuds/dlm
Summary: Being with Cassian feels unbearable at times. There are times where you reach out to him and feel nothing, times where you stare at his back facing you, wondering if he ever tried to kill you, if he had the chance. He could, once. He used to sleep with a blaster under his pillow before he’d settled for placing it by his bedside table, but you wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and feel as though you’ll wake up one day with cool metal plastered against your forehead and his soft breathing against your ear, telling you to wake up, wake up--





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [davidfincher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/davidfincher/gifts).



You are: a blank face with jittery hands, always twitching, always gravitating towards the side of your face so that you can touch your hair. It’s dry in some places and oily in others and you wonder whether there’s something wrong with you, wonder whether if it’s normal to have a million tics going off at once, cells firing upon cells firing upon cells within your body forming a connection to be whole--

You long: to be whole again. Previously, you learnt how to be kind, how to return insects lodged in sinks back into the dirt, how to rearrange the mess around your room so that you looked like a functioning person. Then, you learnt how to pull the trigger of a blaster with a man that insisted he wasn’t your father, he was your _friend_ , and friends taught each other how to kill, lest they be killed themselves.

You wish: that you knew how to receive kindness. A Lorrdian that you met in prison once told you that you were all harsh angles and jagged edges despite your soft cheeks and crooked smile. You knew how to mourn, once, but that seems to have overtaken your entire life instead, always searching for a higher purpose, always feeling as though your chest has been ripped into two and if that someone were to take a step back and really look at you, they would find that you consisted of nothing but black holes instead of stardust.

You own: nothing in this world.

 

* * *

 

Being with Cassian feels unbearable at times. There are times where you reach out to him and feel nothing, times where you stare at his back facing you, wondering if he ever tried to kill you, if he had the chance. He could, once. He used to sleep with a blaster under his pillow before he’d settled for placing it by his bedside table, but you wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and feel as though you’ll wake up one day with cool metal plastered against your forehead and his soft breathing against your ear, telling you to wake up, _wake up--_

“Jyn,” he says, and he reaches out to you. His hands are cold when they touch your shoulder.

You flinch, and he recoils, too. He moves the sheets away so that your leg is exposed to the cold. The two of you are always like this, somehow, always in a constantly fluctuating state and you don’t know where he starts and where you end. Nights are quiet and lonely and the ceiling swims when you stare too long at it. Noise rings in your ear; a permanent fixture, and you wonder whether you’ll have to have fragmented memories coming to your bedside every night.

It frightens you, sometimes.

“Your teeth are chattering,” he says, and he looks tired. His eyebags have darkened since the last time you have slept together, and his stubble appears rough and patchy. “Are you okay?” His voice is thick with sleep, and you feel that you cannot breathe around him, sometimes.

This happens nearly every time you are together.

You shake your head and give him a thin smile, and he does a little nod, seemingly unwilling to push the subject further.

This also happens nearly every time you are together.

His breaths even out and he goes back to sleep, and in the darkness, you can make out the scars on his back; the discolouration on his skin. You wonder whether he feels self-conscious about the dents on his body as you do with yours. You wonder whether he touches himself, sometimes, wonder whether he recoils when he does so. You wonder if he thinks the freckles on your cheeks are like constellations in the sky and you wonder if he thinks that your light footsteps are like moonstones skimming the surface of beaches.

You hold up your hand out, as if you were about to touch the ceiling. You don’t quite manage, of course, but your hand appears almost incongruous in the dark, and you lower it and place it over your chest instead, where you feel it rising and falling with each breath you take. You hold your breath for what seems like hours and when you let go, finally breathing, you feel as though you understand Cassian, if only by a bit.

You say his name softly in the darkness, as if it were a test to see if he would respond. His back doesn’t stiffen; his steady breaths continue. You say your own name afterwards, and you feel how alien it sounds on your tongue, as though you were a stranger in your own body--if your own body was in fact a body. The silence that follows afterwards is like white noise.

When you pull the blankets apart, you see the dip of his back exposed in the darkness, see the brittle quality in his fingers, his inflated beauty.

In the morning, Cassian wakes you up with a soft press of lips on your cheek. “I can hear you thinking,” he mumbles.

“No you can’t,” you say instead, because you don’t want to hurt him, not really. His hand is rough against your face, what with its calluses and general wear and tear, and his fingers feel hot where he’s placed them on your bare hips, and you move towards him, because he is safe and you want to feel as though you belong. Homes don’t need to be a physical place, you think, and you kiss him, sour breath and all. His cheeks are speckled with the sun and flecked with the moon and when you kiss him again you feel a rush of blood to your head. His toes feel cold against yours.

He laughs into your neck, and you love the way his eyes wrinkle when he’s around you like this, and you try to chase away all the sleepless nights, all the your deep suspicions about metal and rust and blood and blood and--

“Jyn,” he says, his hand loosely wrapped around your neck. You wonder whether he would ever grip it tightly until his fingers--or your throat--went blue. As if it were a race to be held, as if you wanted him to oversee you close your eyes and--

“ _Jyn_ ,” he says, again. You open your eyes. Cassian is worried, has rooms filled with nothing but worry because you make him like this, and you find yourself saying sorry with your face scrunched up and your hands by your side.

He makes a quizzical look and brushes your hair away from your face. “For what?”

You don’t know, either, so you end up shaking your head, and he sighs, and he kisses you again, and he tells you that he loves you.

You try to say it back but you find that the words dry up on your tongue and you clench your fists so tightly that when you open them Cassian traces the indentations left behind by your nails.

His voice is soft. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, too.”

You feel as though you are nothing but unfair to Cassian Andor, but again, you find yourself completely still, and when he kisses you again, you fight yourself in order to return it. You end up pulling him closer towards you so that your foreheads bump gently against each other, and he smiles into you, and you smile into him, and he kisses you, he kisses you, he kisses you.

You tell him that there’s no need to be sorry far too late; the words escaping from your mouth before you’ve realised that they’re gone. He sighs and tells you that you’re beautiful, and you don’t have to repeat after him in a monotone or anything, but you hope that he understands. When you hold his hand, you discover that his fingers are clammy and that you’re shaking. His knuckles are permanently bruised and he has childishly applied band-aids over them. He smiles when you notice, and he holds you close against him.

When he moves against you, you find yourself doing the same, and you bite your tongue and taste coppery metal and when he licks your lips open his lips come away stained with red, your red, and you wonder whether he would bite you, next time. He is hard against you and he laughs, almost shy, but you kiss him gently and take him in your mouth because. He makes these wet, gasping noises, and he tangles his fingers in your hair and he swears and apologises and you work two fingers into yourself, and when he comes, he pulls your fingers out and kisses you deeply and he reaches down and opens you whole, and you feel as though you are drowning. He presses into your hips and when he smoothes the invisible cracks there you feel as though you are closer, somehow. You feel your mouth go dry and you lick your lips. You watch how he tracks the movement and you huff, smiling.

His fingers in you sound like filth and familiarity. He is all soft murmurs and quiet laughter when he kisses you deeply and he is lovely and you love him, and the thought terrifies you, but his smiling eyes and wandering hands take you home. He is rough inside you and you throw your head back and when you come, he kisses you and he wraps his arm around you, as if you would let go.

 

* * *

 

He feels new, still, after all these years, after your gardens have spilled into each other and you look at how your fingers linked together, and he says,  _look_ , and you do, and you shrug and pant into each other, breath sweet and heavy and whisky-thick and when he moves away you feel cold.

  


**Author's Note:**

> hahahahahaha what is this hot pile of steaming garbage!!!!!!!!!!
> 
> fight me on [twitter @pixeldad](http://twitter.com/pixeldad)


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